5.12 wave or boat - choosing when to work
when everyone is posting their desk selfies, or their out-of-office views, it can be really isolating when your flow doesn't match theirs. this week's episode is about how we choose, or choose not, to work, and how we can square that with what we see and what we feel. let's dig in!
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=Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week's episode is a phrase that I have found myself using more and more as the times keep becoming less and less unprecedented. And that phrase is sometimes it's the boat, and sometimes it's the wave. So the longer version of that phrase is sometimes work is the wave that's going to sink you.
And sometimes work is the boat. It's going to help you stay afloat amid all the waves. This is my way of explaining that sometimes work feels like the very last thing that we're going to be capable of, and there are other times where work feels like a tiny bit of stability inside a lot of instability.
I started saying this to myself, to clients because there is so much guilt about work, especially in an age where there is so much performativity around work. If you're working, when you're working, how much you're working, what you're working on, and you can feel really guilty if everybody else. Is working.
When you are feeling completely torn under by something really sticky in the world or in the political situation or in your own life more locally, it can feel really hard to be the one person according to Instagram or TikTok or wherever you're looking. The one person who's not working. And it can also feel really bad to be the person who is working where everybody else is.
Like, how can you do that? And that question is not a, Hey, how did you do that? Or What's helping you right now? But more of a judgmental, how can you do that? How can you work on this thing that is so insignificant when the rest of everything is just picture me flailing my arms around. And so this is my way of kind of explaining and giving space for the fact that sometimes it's going to be the wave.
It's the one thing that's going to completely throw you under. And so you can't do it. And there are sometimes where it's gonna be the one thing that's gonna help you ride out some of that storm. Someone is almost assuredly working through conditions that might take you. Off your game. There is probably someone right now who is working through the unimaginable that you can't imagine working through.
And also it's really a normal question to be like, why can't I do that? Why can't I put it to the side? Why can't I just set a timer and focus? Why can't I just close my email or not read the news or put my phone on silent. There are all of these questions, right? That really can be cudgels that we use against ourselves to be like, why can everybody do this, but not you?
But I'm here to say that sometimes you can't even really predict when work is going to be the thing that throws you completely off your game. There have been times in my life where on paper, I would've guessed that I was going to be able to work. That I'd be able to work through that, no problem. I'd done it before I would do it again, and I found myself on the couch watching Gilmore Girls or whatever comfort show of the week that was for sometimes days at a time, if not weeks.
There are some things where in my head, in my plans, I was going to be able to ride out that storm and I simply couldn't work was the thing that taxed my resources the most and I just couldn't get there. And other people were working through it and posting about it and making me feel really tough.
And it was useful for me to be like, you know what? Sometimes this is the one wave that's just gonna knock me out to sea and I don't have to swim in this right now. And then there were other seasons where I would have sworn to you for $1 million that there was no way that I was gonna be able to work.
Personal things that went wrong, world conditions that went wrong, configurations of my scholarly and humanly life where I was like, you know what? I bet that I won't be able to work through this. And then work actually became something really if not soothing, stable. It was something that I controlled.
It was a place where I could close the door and go somewhere else in my brain. And sometimes physically in my body going to coffee shops or the library or getting out of situations that felt really tough and overwhelming Sometimes I found that it was only making sense of my citations or only spending a little bit of time polishing sentences.
That gave me a little bit of breathing space. It gave me something concrete to focus on. Something to do with my energy when a lot of other options didn't feel as comfortable, and I'm sure that people were like, wow, what a monster. I can't believe that she can do that right now. I can't believe that she can focus on it.
And all I know is that in my body and my world and my configuration, it felt correct. It felt safe. It felt important to be working. There is no perfect mix. I wish that I could tell you that there was, but there is no perfect mix that's going to work all of the time of your humanity and your scholarship.
It is always going to be in flux. So if there's no way to say you should work through this, you shouldn't work through that or to give you any ironclad rules, what do I have to offer you this week? This week I have to offer you the. Absolute truth that if you don't have practices around checking in with yourself, knowing what your resources are, what your signs that you're edging into burnout are what weighs your body and your circle and your family will step in and signal to you that this is too much or this isn't enough.
If you don't have practices for checking in with yourself around what you have capacity for and what you don't, and either you are just steadfastly working no matter what the conditions or completely avoiding work, no matter what your capacity is, then you're gonna be in some sort of difficult state eventually.
It might not be soon. It might not be immediately, but that's a recipe for burnout or for some pretty hardcore avoidance. Working or not working without checking in with yourself. That's the thing that can get you into trouble. It isn't actually choosing to work or choosing not to work. Those things, more or less neutral. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's gonna help you and sometimes it's not. I'm not making any hard and fast rules about working or not working.
What I am saying is that if you are not doing those things, making those choices in conversation with yourself, with how you feel, with what you have to give, with your ability to focus with what your resources are, then that's the thing that we really wanna work on. I hope that this gave you some sort of solace.
I hope that this gave you a permission slip in either direction or at least reignited a little bit of a desire to check in with yourself before, during, and after your work sessions. This week, I'm gonna be taking a short break. I'll be back in October with a brand new season of the podcast. But thank you so much for joining me with this one.
I will see you all soon. Okay.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.11 don’t have to fix it - it feels hard because it is hard
if you have felt like the world's most powerful expert in your field on a monday, only to feel like the biggest beginner baby on tuesday, congratulations, you're an academic.
what if i told you that it wasn't a problem?
it feels hard because it is hard. let's get into it this week <3
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
This week's episode is all about the phrase, this feels hard because it is hard, and if I could give you one gift of compassion for yourself and for other people this week, it would be that phrase. It feels hard because it is hard now, academia life.
Being alive in 2025. It's all hard stuff, right? And I think that there's this idea that if we just try hard enough, if we get the right schedule, the right tools, if we read the right books, if we hire the right coach, it will all be easier and it will feel easier. And that the feelings that we have of being stuck, of struggling, of working really hard are signs that we're not doing enough, as opposed to.
Assign that actually what you're doing is really hard, and that's why it feels the way that it does now in academia specifically. It is hard work from top to bottom. It doesn't stop being hard because as you keep going, there are more things to learn, more roles to take on, more responsibilities to shoulder, and your life keeps moving too, right?
So you're moving into new life phases. Your family might have a new configuration, you might have new caretaking, responsibilities, all kinds of stuff. So it moves and fits and starts. You get feedback, whether that's direct or indirect, and then you have to keep going. In the microcosm of a writing project or the macrocosm of an academic career, you are always working in multiple drafts.
And it can be so difficult because one of the reasons that academia is so appealing to a lot of us is because we like school. We were good at school. I know that when I finished my undergrad, I felt like I was at the top of my game. I was an expert. I had completed a thesis. I had never known more than I did at that particular moment.
And then I got to grad school and it was this constant push and pull between, yes, I'm at the top of my field. I'm learning these things that are so complicated, I'm using them correctly in seminar. I'm writing these papers, they're getting accepted. I'm passing my exams. And then at the same time of feeling this.
Sort of incredible mastery. I also never felt like more of a beginner. I felt like I didn't know how to write. I felt like I didn't know how to read. I was going back to the beginning to learn all of these things that I thought I was really good at. You know, on Friday you're presenting a paper to your seminar and you're on the top of the world, and the next Monday you're getting feedback that the draft that you turned in was actually not at all what they expected, and you need to go back to square one.
That dissonance between I'm at the top and I'm also a beginner. I've never been better at this, but also I'm still learning is one of the hallmarks of academia, and I think that so much of the time we internalize this idea that if it's feeling difficult, if we feel like a beginner, if it's feeling like a challenge.
We feel sticky and heavy and stuck, then that means we're not doing it well and that there are other imaginary people out there who are only feeling the top of that wave and trough cycle. You know, they're only ever getting the standing ovations and the acceptances and the contracts and the jobs, and they're never going through some of that bottom stuff.
And of course it's easy to feel that way when academics cont tend to only really publicize the tops of those waves. Or when people are on social media showing you their to-do lists or how locked in they are at the coffee shop. And you're not really realizing that between every moment of success that you're seeing, there are probably so many more of difficulty.
Challenge starting from square one, going backwards, really feeling lost, that you just don't see. I can promise you that if you're looking at an academic anywhere, they have felt this dissonance between. It is hard, and also I've never been better at it, so I'm really encouraging you to lean into the idea that this is a feature of the academic life and it's not a bug.
This feeling, this feeling of it being really hard, never really goes away because it isn't tied to any external marker. If the feeling of being. Challenged by academia went away. It would've gone away already because think of all of the milestones that maybe you yourself have already accomplished. You have gotten accepted into the PhD program.
You passed your first classes. You made it through your coursework. You maybe you've passed your exams, maybe your prospectus has been accepted, maybe you've gotten that paper accepted. Maybe the journal article's been published, maybe even book chapters or whole books. It doesn't really matter because every accomplishment that you get, if it was going to make that feeling go away, it would've already and as.
Hard as it is for me to tell you this. I also hope there's a little bit of solace in the idea that as you keep going, here are a list of other things that don't make that feeling go away either getting the academic job, getting tenure, getting to be full professor, getting to be the chair of the department, elevating yourself into dean or an administrative role. None of it makes the feeling go away because that feeling isn't achievement driven. It's a feeling of I am working at the top of my game to do something that's incredibly hard and it feels this way because it is that hard. So to all of my friends. Who find themselves stuck in the feeling of this is so hard.
I encourage you to not ask yourself this week, what would I do to make this feel easier sometimes? That's a great question, but this week I want you to ask yourself, what would make it easier for me to do hard things? For example, if the question was not, how do I make it easier to pass my exams, but how do I make it easier to study and prepare as much as I need to in order to feel confident about my exams?
It's a switch from trying to. Change the way you're going about a task to trying to change the way you're supporting yourself through that task. Because these are really hard things and they might get easier with time. You're going to find that the first chapter of your dissertation is going to be harder than writing the fourth chapter, but still will always be hard.
It's always gonna be a hard thing. So instead of focusing on relentless improvement, maybe this week, give yourself a chance at relentless support instead. See you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.4 unlimited restarts - for distracted brains and tricky days
i am sure this never happens to you but - i sometimes say that i'll get to my desk by 9:15 am, and then it's 10 and i think "well, gotta try again tomorrow!" or i'll mean to start with one task and do six other ones and then feel so badly about not doing what i meant to that i'll watch XO, KITTY instead. this is the phrase i use to help myself get back to what i meant to spend my time and energy on, and i offer it here in case you, too, could use an extra restart or two.
mentioned:
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today's episode, we're talking about the phrase unlimited restarts. Now, if you've worked with me in any capacity, you've probably heard me say this, but this is actually one of the phrases that I use the most myself because I need unlimited restarts. You don't get just one chance to start something, you can actually keep starting over and over again.
Maybe you like me, can get a little bit frozen, a little bit shut down. Especially if you get too in your head about advice, like eat the frog or start your day with the hardest thing, or make a schedule and stick to it. Now this is all useful. Practical advice, it can help to start the day with the hardest thing or to have a schedule because it takes some of the decision making out of the way, right?
You start with a big win. You know what you're gonna be doing when that's great, but if anything happens to disrupt the start of that day, then a lot of us have trouble with that. Maybe you sleep in, maybe you get derailed by an email. Maybe the cat knocks over the coffee. Maybe something unexpected happens, and then before you know it, it's an hour or it's two hours, or it's a day after your imagined start, or that imagined thing that you thought you were going to be working on.
It's been set aside and you think, man, I have two choices. I can restart tomorrow and then do tomorrow perfectly, or I can work on something easy so that I don't waste all this time and I'll just save that hard thing for tomorrow. I'm here to offer you a third path, which is what about unlimited restarts?
Now I think about this game all of the time. It's a video game. I actually have not personally played it, but I'm really bad at video games. I didn't have them growing up as a kid, and so I like to watch other people play video games, but this video game is called Super Me Boy, and it's really, really hard.
You are a ball of ground meat trying to escape. This maze of saws, I think in order to rescue a princess and it is mind bogglingly difficult, you only can get through it because you have unlimited restarts. The way that the game works is that you go, you play for a second or a second and a half, and you die, and then you start over again.
But there's this interview with creators of the game in a documentary, and I'll link to it in the show notes if you want. But they talk about how when they were building this game, they knew it was gonna be really, really hard, hard for people, and that the chance that a player would get frustrated before they build the skills in order to be able to actually play Super Meet Boy and have it be fun meant that they had to make the restarting process as easy and painless and frictionless as they possibly could.
Otherwise, you would get so frustrated trying to reload the game that you would just give up. You would be like, man, this is too hard. And you would do one of the infinity other things that you could possibly be doing. So restarting the game is as fast as they could possibly make it. There's no loading screens, there's nothing to reset, there's no respond point.
You just start back over again. Super Meat Boy is hard. Restarting is easy because the creators know that it was hard and they respect that. So they make the process of you trying as easy as they can so that you actually will try. I think about this all of the time in the context of grad school, because in my head I thought the grad school was gonna be fine.
I didn't know it was gonna be this hard, and you might be laughing as you hear me say this because like of course Katie doing a PhD is hard. You talk about it all the time. The name of this podcast is grad school is Hard, but, but I honestly will tell you that my brain can trick me into thinking that I should be better at these things.
I should be faster at them. And now, even though I'm out of my PhD and I have that fancy doctorate title, I still think things should be easier than they actually are. So. I have to remind myself that it's actually really hard to get your day started. It can be really hard to sit down and get yourself into the flow of work.
It can be hard to ignore emails and open up that dissertation. It's hard to sit down and write for 25 minutes. It's really hard to stay in a research headspace when there's a thousand other things. You could be focusing on grad school. Is hard, and sometimes you need to make it really easy to do things one bazillion gazillion times until it gets slightly easier to do that stuff.
So what could you do to make unlimited restarting? As frictionless as it possibly could be. Here's a quick example of how it looks for. I have a target time of getting to my desk. Let's say it's 9:15 AM Whoops. I got caught cleaning up the kitchen and a bunch of other life errands, and now it's 10. My brain sometimes will like to whisper and say, Ugh, we should just try again tomorrow, or try again next week.
It's already Wednesday. Let's just try and have a whole fresh week. My brain loves the idea of a whole day, a whole fresh start, but instead I tell it let's restart again and we try again at 10. So the 10:00 AM means that I will start writing my morning pages, which is a tool that I've used off and on for years where I try and start my day with some freehand or typed just like brain dump type writing.
It's at 10 o'clock marginal, whether this is still the morning, it's definitely not the first thing I've done over the day. It does really help me. But whoops, I clicked away from the tab, or I saw my phone light up with a notification and I responded to a bunch of emails and in my head I was like, oh, that could be a quick warmup.
But now it's 1115 and some things are done, but I still have not touched my morning pages. Unlimited restarts means I can do my morning pages. At 1115 or 4:00 PM or whenever I want to, my apologies to Julia Cameron, the creator of this practice, who firmly believes that you should in fact do your morning pages as soon as you get up during the day, or at least as soon as you sit down to work.
But they're a tool and she can't see me at my desk, so I. Do them. Whenever I can do them. I give myself an unlimited number of times to try them during the day. If I don't do them one day, I get to try them again an unlimited number of times the next day. Another way to think about this is that you're coming back to the present moment.
In meditation, another practice that is wildly difficult for me personally. It actually is really hard to stop yourself from thinking or to have a completely clear mind or to focus on your breath or to even detach from your thoughts. So. I love what one of my meditation teachers told me one time that the job of a meditator is not to control their brain, but it's just to notice their brain.
It's about noticing when you've drifted and you've started thinking about the color of the walls or the coffee that you really wanna have later, and you come back to that anchor, the breath, the visualization, whatever you're using. We all spend so much time trying to control our environment, our schedule, and our habits, and yeah, there's good reasons to do that.
Reduce distractions. If you can set yourself up for success, build on those habits that are gonna support you. But if you could spend some of that energy caring for yourself as you necessarily need to do things over, make it easy on yourself. Don't beat yourself up every time the day gets out of hand.
Give yourself unlimited restart. That is going to help you feel less activated, feel less upset, feel less distracted by the fact that things aren't going the way that you want them to, and easier to come back to the things that you wanted to do. The creators of Super Meat Boy knew that restarting would be the defining mechanism of their game, so they spent as much time as they possibly could, making it feel good and supported, and pain-free and easy as possible.
What can you do to help yourself invest in what you do and tell yourself around that practice of restarting, adjusting, and coming back to your goals? What would make it 10% easier to do that? Is it a sticky note that you put on your desk? Is it a little restart routine with some deep breaths and a glass of water?
It's totally up to you, an individual, but I promise you that the more times you offer yourself the chance to restart, the more likely it is that you're gonna finish what you meant to start. Anyway, see you next week, I hope.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.3 do it on purpose - intentionality as a tool
in an age of dual monitors and triple screens and nearly unlimited ways to work, it can be really tempting to do a thousand things, or three things, at once. this episode is about how that might actually be costing you time and energy. an ode to intentionality, see why i want you to do it, no matter what it is, on purpose.
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
I am a human and I watch Netflix just like everyone else. I also wander away from my desk to do one thing and find myself doing six other things and forget the original thing that I meant to do. And sometimes I ate a whole bag of candy before I noticed that I had more than just a handful. We all do things on autopilot or we keep doing things without making a conscious decision to do them.
It's actually really hard to do things on purpose. Especially right now when everyone is stressed and, and I mean everyone, it's so much easier to do things in zombie land and then boom, it's the next month, the next week, the next year. So I keep bringing myself back to one of my foundational rules. Do it on purpose.
If you're going to watch Netflix, really watch it. Get some snacks, get a blanket, get cozy and watch every frame. If you're gonna nap, do it on your bed or on your couch, rather than just dozing off at your desk. If you're gonna eat some chips, put them in a bowl. Really go for it. Savor them. Be present.
Enjoy every last crunch. If you're gonna do emails, set some si time aside and put all your attention on that task rather than just mindlessly refreshing your inbox all day and not doing the work that you actually wanted to do. And if you catch yourself in autopilot and let's be real who isn't in autopilot at least part of the day, then you can recenter and ask, wait, am I doing this on purpose?
Rest feels so much more restful when you actually commit to it, instead of just working at 20% and then hoping that you feel rested and then are also somehow done with everything at the end of that session. Work is going to feel more focused and efficient if you're doing task on purpose. With all of your energy focused on it like a laser beam, you might get more done in 15 minutes actually focusing on it than you do in two or three hours with only 20% of your attention.
And when we continually check in with that intentionality, it's so much easier to see the traps that we set for ourselves or the beliefs that we've inherited that really don't benefit us. Are you watching Netflix in the background because you're trying to write and you're so tired that the only way that you could convince yourself to sit down at your workspace is to actually have your media friends on in the background?
Why not actually watch your show? Enjoy an hour or 30 minutes of an actual rest break, and then try again after you're done. Are you trying to work but doing so much in a time and place that isn't really set up to help you thrive? Yeah, maybe you need to make some changes like keeping your phone away from your desk or using a website blocker, closing your email tab so that you can actually do what you meant to do.
There's no shame in using those tools. There's no shame in making it easier to do things on purpose. That's why yoga studios have a door that close closes. That's why people meditate in places that are quiet Sometimes you have to change the environment to help the brain. There's no bad or wrong thing to do, and one of the great benefits of being a grad student is that you have some flexibility.
So if you need to take a 30 minute break at 10 o'clock in the morning, take it. Enjoy your show, have a little breakfast, you make yourself a really good coffee, and then get back to it. Everybody needs to answer emails. Probably almost everybody needs to get some writing done, but if you're gonna do it, try your best to do it on purpose, because when we snap into that autopilot.
That programming of what we need or what we're gonna do, or that little voice in our head. Or maybe it's not even fully a voice that says, Hmm, maybe I'll start with some emails, or, Hmm, maybe I'll just check and see what's going on in the news that programming might not be lining up with what actually needs to happen or what actually helps support you in this particular moment.
Okay. Doing things on purpose lets us actually tune in to how we're feeling, what we need in this specific moment. It might be different than what you needed this morning or what you needed last week, and it lets you make some changes. Doing things on purpose is one of the best ways that I know to work through really sticky seasons, because doing a few things on purpose almost always takes less time and less energy than doing a million things on autopilot.
I am sending you this message because this is what I needed to hear this week myself. It's what I needed to do. I needed to not try and get six things done at a time I needed to do one thing, even if that one thing was take a walk or take a couple of stitches on my sweater or make myself a really good cup of coffee.
Enjoy it, do it on purpose, and I'll see you next week.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.2 the second best time - starting in the mess
the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.
the second best time is today.
it is so easy to get stuck in the undeniable truth that things would be better/easier/faster if we started them earlier, or had better working conditions. this episode is all about how i work through that truth and give myself permission to start it messy, and do it in pieces.
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today I'm gonna talk to you about one of the phrases that I use all of the time to help get myself moving when things are less than ideal. That saying is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. I. Now I'm a logical person and I bet you are a logical person as well, and it can be so easy to get stuck in that undeniable truth that almost everything that we're working on would benefit from more time, more resources.
More planning ahead, more strategy. Who hasn't sat down and thought, man, this would be so much easier if I had just started last week, or if I had just gotten this plan moving earlier, or if I had done X, Y, or Z. And let's face it, you're not wrong. It would be easier with more time. It would be easier with more resources.
It would be easier to do what you had to do today if you had started it yesterday. But it's so easy to get stuck in that first part of the saying that the best time was 20 years ago and not focus on the second part about what it would look like to start today. The second best option. Now, you might not be sitting at your desk thinking, man, you know.
I couldn't get this started a month ago, so there's no point in starting it today. I guess I'll just give up and, you know shop for pens online. You might be able to tell that. I'm very interested in stationary right now. It's my kind of hyper fixation window shopping thing. Very few people are doing this to the letter where they're like, man, you know, I can't do it perfectly, so I'm just not going to do it at all.
But I see this happening in things like, okay. I won't be able to start this this week, but next week I'll have a full slate. You know, I'll have a blank slate. I'll be able to focus on this a hundred percent. So I'm gonna wait for next week. I'm gonna wait for the top of the hour. I'm gonna wait for the next Pomodoro.
I'm gonna wait for next semester or next month or next year, or when I get tenure. Lots of people think about this kind of like perfect conditions, and that's really what this phrase gets at for me, that sure. If you had perfect conditions. It would be easier and better to start underneath those perfect conditions.
But what if we think about the second best conditions, which usually means getting started. Now it's less poetic and satisfying to get part of something started. I'm gonna be the first one to admit to you that this is something that I'm really personally struggling with. Before I became a parent, I had more time and energy and resources to get things done, and I used to be able to sit down and do whole tasks in one go.
I could draft, write, edit, and send something. All without stopping if I wanted to. And now I sit here recording this podcast with one eye on a baby monitor, hoping that that baby stays asleep as long as he can so that I can maybe get this podcast recorded because I drafted it last night. I know I'm gonna have to edit it later.
If I'm lucky, I'll get it posted today. It's just the reality. And so if I wait for a. Perfect set of conditions, I'm probably never gonna get there. I'm probably never going to find that perfect window where the baby is sleeping and I am rested and everything is under control in my inbox and nobody needs me anywhere else and I can do it.
And it's really easy for me to get stuck in the man. I should have just done this yesterday when I actually did laundry, or I handled something that was more pressing or I could only get myself to, search for a couple new books in the library that I know I wanted to read, and that was literally all the brain power that I had.
It's so easy to be like, yeah, I wish. But the second best option is for me to do it. Now, the second best option is for me to do it in pieces. The second best option is for me to try it, experiment, hit a wall, and know for tomorrow or for the next day, or for whenever I get back to it again, that that path isn't gonna work.
Very, very rarely do I talk to anyone who regrets getting something started. Having half of an assignment that you need to have drafted for your class helps when you sit down to start it again, having a draft or an outline or some post-it note thoughts about the thing that you need to write this afternoon.
They help, they make it a little bit easier. Your brain isn't wrong. It would be better to do all of these things having started earlier or under more ideal conditions. And it can be helpful sometimes to be like, yeah, brain, you're right. This would be better, this would be easier, but. The next best thing is for me to get a little bit of motion on it right now.
This is the next best thing, the second best thing. And unlike getting magical, more time or a time machine, or more resources or changing the kind of very real conditions of your working life today. Getting started now, planting that metaphorical tree. It's still possible. This is a short and sweet idea with the hopes that maybe you hear it and it hits you and you think, okay, what's the next smallest thing that I can do today?
What's the thing that feels possible? Hearkening back to last week's episode. I am there with you in the thick of it, doing bits, doing pieces, and moving forward what I can when I can. Thank you so much and I will see you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
5.1 what feels possible - finding the cracks when you're stuck
in this episode, i explore the question "what feels possible" - an anchor phrase i started using five years ago and still reach for today with clients, and with myself. i talk about strategies to check in with your brain and body, and start there to make small but useful progress when you feel stuck and overwhelmed. get into it!!
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Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
Today's episode is all about a question that I have used since the pandemic, but find more and more useful, honestly, every year since. The question is what feels possible right now. And I started using this question with clients and with myself because there was so much overwhelm that I was seeing.
There were a million things. That people could do. There were a thousand things that needed to be done and all of that pressure, time sensitivity, it just led to a state of overwhelm, a state of freeze, and there would be clients and we would sit on calls and I would be like, okay. I am not sure what to do.
Are you sure what to do? And we could intellectualize it all day long. We could say, oh, it would be most efficient if we started here, or it would be the easiest if we started here. And the problem that I kept seeing was that we could think through those things, but we couldn't get the body to actually do it.
I know that I've talked about the brain body split a couple of times on this podcast, but I think that it's really useful to turn to it when we're thinking about how we're moving through the day when things feel really sticky and tough. So check in with yourself right now.
Take a deep breath, let it out, and notice what's happening in your brain right now. Is it doing a thousand things? Are you listening to this podcast, but also thinking about what to make for dinner and what grading needs to be done? Is it busy, busy, busy? And then also check in with your body. Maybe it's a physical movement thing.
Are you on a bus? Are you sitting in a chair? Are you doing the dishes? Are your hands moving? You could think about it on the level of movement, but you could also think about it on the level of sensation. Do you feel tightness in your throat or in your shoulders? Maybe you feel a sense of anxiety. That kind of prickly, tingly electrical feeling is how it shows up.
For me from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, that makes me feel restless. Restless, restless, but also like I can't really settle on anything. Maybe you feel a little bit frozen. Your limbs could feel heavy, your senses could be a little bit dull. You might even feel pressure like you are underwater or in a big, heavy space suit and you can't quite move.
And these are all different states that you could feel, or maybe you feel perfectly regular. You feel like there is energy and movement and you could go here or go there and your breath feels restorative and your senses feel on point. The question, what feels possible? Is a way to check in and think about where your brain and body can get synced up and you can maybe move forward with something if your brain is really leading.
I find that that looks like a lot of, for me, planning, strategizing, and in this. The very minute that you're doing it making that epic to-do list thinking through your schedule, making all of these plans, it really feels like you're moving forward. It's like, yes, I've proved to myself on paper that all of this can happen, but I notice that when I'm doing a lot of that planning, I, my brain is really active, but my body feels a little bit shut down sometimes that it seems to know that every.
Single thing that I put on that list is just another thing for me to do, another thing that needs to get done. And it feels heavier and heavier as I keep going, even if my brain is lighting up and thinking, yes, yes, yes, this is it. Sometimes I am feeling really ready to go physically. Limbs feel good.
Pain feels good. I am. Physically limber and loose and you know, I'm moving around my house and I'm putting things away, but my brain, she's not checked in. She is not really capable of the high level work that say, like reading my draft, it might be, or writing a blog post or doing some grading. What feels possible.
Is a question that you can use to see, okay, where's my brain at, where's my body at? And what feels possible for me to do right now? I will walk you through an example. This is a little bit vulnerable, but I will show you right now how it shows up for me. And so. I am a person who hates getting in the shower first thing in the morning.
I find it a violent way to enter the day, but I also know that, lots of people recommend starting a shower every day. I live in a house with people who shower every day first thing in the morning, and it's one of those things that my brain has decided is a quote thing good productive people do.
End quote. So I can sit in bed and be completely. Mentally amped up like, okay, here's my day. Here's what's going on. Here's my schedule. I have this at 10, I have this at 12, and I will hear. In my sort of litany of the day that like, okay, you gotta get up shower first, and my whole body rebels about that.
And so I end up scrolling on my phone looking at my book. I might start even working in on my phone in my bed, which I don't necessarily love it when that happens, but because I've said, okay, I should take a shower first. I get stuck, I get frozen. I. Start doing things that don't feel necessarily lined up.
Because I have this big barrier. I have to take a shower first, and then I can get started with my day. So instead of asking what should come first or what would be the best thing to do, first thing in the morning, I ask myself what feels possible. It might not feel possible to take a shower, but it might feel possible to.
Get up, use the bathroom, brush my teeth, put on some comfy clothes and start making breakfast. It might feel possible to get up, brush my teeth, take my meds, and head down to my desk and see what emails are there, but look at them in a place that feels a little bit more supportive and not purpose driven for work, let's say.
It feels better for me to check my email and my computer than it does to check it on my phone. So if I say, okay, what feels possible right now, it, it physically gets me up and out of bed and moving because I'm giving myself permission essentially, to move through what feels possible instead of what I think I should be doing.
This might show up for you at your desk where you sit down and you think, okay, I really need to get started on that draft. I should get started on that draft. Everybody says to start with the most important thing, but your brain and body just straight up rebel, and so you end up shopping for, a bathing suit that you might not ever need, or you do what I do and look at the newest pen releases and think, man, I really need those rainbows out of pens.
That would really make this easier. And because you've told yourself that you have to get started with the writing first, that that's what you should be doing, you end up freezing. You end up doing things getting stuck in a swirl of procrastination and stuckness. So maybe you say what feels possible.
It might not feel possible to start right into your draft right away, but it might feel possible to open up your inbox and pick an email to respond to. If you feel overwhelmed by the state of your inbox, it might not feel possible to say, okay, I'm gonna set a timer for an hour and I'm gonna sit here and respond to emails until they're knocked out.
But it might feel possible to respond to a specific email that's really been bugging you, and then see what happens from there. I myself, very rarely sit down at my desk and jump into anything. High intensity intellectually. I often need a little bit of a warmup. And then once I feel that movement, they're like, yes.
That sense of checking things off. I feel a little bit less stuck. I feel a little bit less heavy, and I feel a little bit more confident with some of the higher, more intense tasks. What feels possible is a way to sense. The cracks in that feeling of overwhelm. So many of us sit down and we see a wall of everything that needs to be done, and instead of trying to climb that wall or go around that wall, or you know.
Instead of trying to climb that wall or go around that wall, we just sit down in front of it, or we walk in the other direction or we move, do anything we can to not acknowledge the weight of everything that needs to happen. This question, what feels possible is a way to say, okay, I sense that this part of the task, this part of the thing that feels so heavy, this part, this tiny part.
Feels a little bit more possible. It feels a little more doable. It feels like a way in. So you start there cracks are how the light gets in. As the old adage says, you start with the cracks and the what feels possible question helps you see those cracks. Ways to know that you might need this question as a way to get started on your day or as a way to reset or just a question to use anytime.
If you are hearing a lot of should or would in your internal monologue, that's a really good sign that your brain is creating that vortex of stuckness. I should start with this. I should shower first. I should eat the frog. I would really benefit from doing X, Y, or Z first. Instead, what feels possible as a guiding question helps you focus on the coulds.
I could start with breakfast. I could put my library books away. I could start with my morning pages. I could respond to that email instead of, I should respond to all of these emails. I. Give yourself a little bit of permission to see if you can't start a little bit of movement, a little bit of a pathway out of that sense of feeling frozen and into a sense of possibility.
What feels possible remains one of the biggest gifts of a time of a global instability and overwhelm. It's been a gift to me. I regularly have people tell me that they still use this question five years later. I still use this question five years later, and as so many of us are facing another period of instability and overwhelm, whether that's on a national scale or a global scale, or a university.
Kayla, or maybe just a personal one, I thought it might be useful to come and share that gift. Thank you so much and I will see you soon.
📍 Thank you for listening to Grad School is Hard, but... You can find more information and resources in the show notes and at thrive-phd.com. Every month, I'll select one reviewer for a free 45 minute session with me. So please subscribe, rate, and review to help spread the word about the show. Thanks so much and I'll see you again soon!
AcWriMo Ask Us Anything with Dr. Kate Henry!
i am so excited to be back! and what better to kick off season five with than an Ask Us Anything Q and A with my colleague and frequent collaborator, Dr. Kate Henry! we answer questions about being bored with a long project, working on your scholarship in very limited time, writing for "the general public", and more! get into it!
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📍 Welcome to Grad School is Hard, But... A Thrive PhD podcast. I'm Dr. Katy Peplin and this is a show for everyone who's doing the hard work of being a human and a scholar.
In this season,
I'll be sharing the anchor phrases, tools, and strategies that underpin all of the work that I do with clients as part of Thrive PhD, and of course, the things that work for me as I attempt to be a human and a scholar.
And make sure you check out the link in the show notes for my working more intentionally tool kit. Which is available for you totally for free. Now let's get into it
As part of this year's Akraimo celebrations, as part of this year's Akraimo celebrations, I worked with my colleague and frequent collaborator, Dr. Kate Hendry. You might know her at the tending year on Instagram or at her website. The Kate Henry dot com or maybe her amazing book, but it's been my joy and pleasure to work with her.
As part of this year's AcWriMo celebrations, I worked with my colleague and frequent collaborator Dr. Kate Henry. You might know her from The Tending Year and at Instagram or her website, katehenry. com, or maybe even her book. Scholars from all over the world submitted questions to us about productivity, workflows, academic writing, and being a human while you do all that stuff.
It was a joy to answer these questions and I hope you learn as much from Dr. Henry as I did.
All right, I am so excited. So let's hop right into it with our first question. Hi, Kate and Katie. I've been working on my dissertation for a couple of years, and I recently haven't been feeling as much motivation to show up and write. I frequently get distracted and procrastinate, maybe just because I'm feeling a little bit bored.
Do you have suggestions for ways I can jumpstart my excitement about my research again? Oh, this is such a good question. I'm curious, Kate, what, like, jumps to mind for you, first of all? What jumps to mind for me, first of all, is to go and read other dissertations for inspiration. Like, to read dissertations by folks who are in your department, or folks who are doing similar work to you, and to allow that to both inspire you, and also to remind you that You can do it like to remind you like, Oh, I can fill in an outline with similar things to this.
And I imagine that that might get you excited about the project again. So that's the first thing that comes to my mind is to seek out inspiration around the project. And I think that's so important for like, expectation setting too. I know that for me, when I would work on my dissertation, like, I frequently had to like, bring it back down to what I would call like, a dissertation size project.
Because like, the more research I would do, the more I'd be like, okay, well, this is now six manuscripts worth of stuff. And so I need to bring it back down. And reading other dissertations was like, oh, I don't need to write six different books. I can do what this person did. So I love that advice. I will do, I will say that for me the middle is when I always get a little bit bored.
I have like a lot of like shiny new thing energy and I also will be like, oh yeah, I can push through to the finish line, like if that's in sight, but in the middle I need. rewards and like gamification, not unlike, you know, like dog training or like potty training, like I need to be able to see it. So for me, the middle is when I start to do like, okay, I'm going to color in my hundred Pomodoro chart.
And it, once I get to a hundred, I get like, you know, a nice new hand cream or whatever the reward is, or I, you know, make sticker charts, or I do word counts, or I try to keep a streak, all of those like Duolingo style gamifications can be really helpful for me. So like, if the motivation's not in the project, I try and put it in the habit, or the practice, or the, the measurement, because sometimes that can like, bring a little sparkle back for me too.
Yeah, I totally hear that and like the reward setting for it that also makes me think for this particularly like if you need like a change of scenery, even if it's like a different space and you're like, are you going to a coffee shop or to a library or like some place that you could feel inspired or like treat yourself by and like that might jumpstart your focus, even if it's just for like, I'm doing this for a half hour, like something that might Might spark it.
Yeah, I used to go and use my kitchen counter as a standing desk for that. Like, I would just be like, okay, let's just type for an hour over here and maybe that'll feel a little bit different. So sometimes body first can really help. Okay. Well, I think that's a couple of suggestions for that. So, how about this second question, which I'm also really excited to hear what you have to think about it.
So because of my work schedule, this person asks, I can really only work on my scholarship one day a week. Do you have tips on how I can get the most out of my limited work time? Yes, I bring a fresh new perspective to this having a nine month old chaos agent in my house. So I'm definitely, but I would love to hear what works for you first.
Yeah, I'm definitely, yeah, I'm definitely curious to hear from you around your experience with parenting. I just have a two year old chihuahua who is, has a lot of, probably, An equal amount. Needed care, you know but not quite the same. But I think about this question, I think for the folks that I work with, and I'm sure also the folks that you work with, it's very common due to health or caretaking or work to have little limited amounts of time to work on scholarship.
And two things come to my mind. The first is if you only have a limited amount of time. To get incredibly clear on what you are working on. So to right size your tasks for the amount of time that you have. So you're not just like I'm writing my dissertation. It becomes, I'm doing my topic sentences for my introduction, like much more accessible and doable.
And the second thing that comes to my mind is setting up accountability during those work sessions. So this might be coworking with a colleague or a friend or Either like, live on zoom or in person, or having a shared checklist in a Google doc or something where you can report back or even just if you're on your own, like, having a Pomodoro timer, like, something that will set up maybe gamify the approach and have some sort of external accountability.
So you can. be more efficient during shorter time blocks. So that's what comes to my mind when I think about how to maximize a small amount of time. But what do you think, Katie? Yeah, so I definitely agree with all of those suggestions. And the other thing that I would add is that I think that time spent planning, either in the beginning of that session or like throughout the week when like maybe, you know, you don't quite have the energy to like work on your scholarship, say after work or like after caretaking, but you do have the energy to kind of make a checklist, like make some plans.
I know that. For me personally, I've been finding it really, really helpful to set up everything so that when the like stars align, and that's truly what it feels like sometimes, like the, the brain and the body and the work and the environment all come together and you only have an hour that you have a sense, like you said, of like, this is the specific two or three things that I can do.
And for me, having a choice has also been really helpful. Like, okay, I can either do this or I can do this. And having that outsourced into a task manager, or a to do list, or a journal, or somewhere where I can like, park my brain. Because I find that, for me personally, my brain is working at like, a low level in waves throughout the week.
And I work with so many people who carry so much shame around not working every day. And then I'm like, you are working on it, though. You're thinking about it, you're, you're imagining, you may be reading, you might be checking emails, you might be teaching on something similar. Like, you're engaged in it.
Give yourself credit for that work, and then, if you need to, Give yourself permission to spend a little bit extra energy in the capturing of those thoughts, like yell into a voice note, send your friend a text about those things, scribble maniacal notes to yourself in a planner, and you know, maybe only 40 of them, 40 percent of them will make sense later, but capturing those thoughts when they happen so that you don't have to rely on your brain to To remember all of those things and immediately jump into it.
That would be my, my advice because the you're working on it all the time. Even if it's only like a 1 or 2 or 10 percent level. So give yourself credit for it. Capture it when you can. And. Do your best to
capture it when you can. Yeah. I that's so brilliant. The idea to record that, like to record it when you have these ideas, even if it's not during a work session, I'll often do this with like, I have to remember to do X and I'll just throw it in my Google calendar for later this week. So it pops up and it's a reminder to me like, Oh, don't forget to do X.
And it just was like, Arbitrarily thrown in there, like not on a to do list, but like, I know I'll see the notification later, right? So I like this idea of record it when it's in your mind, even if it's not totally fleshed out yet. Yeah, and I think that offloading some of that to some other system, whether it's your Google calendar or a piece of paper or a planner or something, I think that a lot of us expect that like real academics or good academics can just like hold it all up there and And I haven't met anyone who hasn't found it helpful to be able to look at a physical reflection of at least part of those ideas, whatever form that takes.
So yeah. Okay. Excellent question. Thank you to our reader for sending that in. Okay. Thank you for this Q and A, Dr. Peplin and Dr. Henry. You're welcome. You have both written for academia, like your dissertations and journal articles, but you. Also, both have transitioned to writing newsletters and blog posts.
I'm curious to hear how you made that transition. And if you think your academic training helps you with writing for more general audiences, as a book author, Dr. Henry, I am at your, like your knees to, you know, as a, as a student to hear this, because I really look to you as somebody who's made this transition really brilliantly.
Thank you. That's so kind. That feels great to hear. What came to my mind when I read this question was thinking how academic writing really follows a template that's already laid out before us. Of course, we can get creative and, you know, do lots of interesting stuff, but like, I was always able to read sample dissertations, like read other things in reverse outline, which I know you have lots of wonderful like lessons on that.
And that set me up to like, you know, create my own templates that I would utilize for blog posts. For newsletters now, like I, it's often like I outline things ahead of time and outlining was a skill. I developed in graduate school and I'm doing that. And similar for my book, like it was similar in terms of like the outlining.
It was not the same thing as a dissertation. The book was a little bit more like, Oh, what do I want this to look like? It can look like all it doesn't have to have a method section. Right. So there was more freedom there, but I still definitely. You know, benefit from the reverse outlining the templates that outlines that I utilized in school.
But I also think for writing online, this is not directly an answer to the question, but I really love how there's like so little gatekeeping. Like I'm like, Oh, I can write whatever I want and I can share this. It doesn't have to go through like peer review. It doesn't have to take like a year to get published and maybe it doesn't.
So that's something that, you know, academia. You know, was much slower and I find it wonderful that it's much more accessible to be publishing online. I imagine you concur with that, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I do. So, this is like kind of a tender question for me because I still have a lot of baggage, I think, around my identity as a writer.
I, when I was in grad school and even afterward, never identified myself as a writer. I almost always was like, oh, I'm a teacher. And I sometimes write that down. And that was really useful for me when I was writing because I was like, okay, I would imagine when I would get stuck on things, if I had to teach this to a very smart undergrad, what would I teach it to?
You know, how would I teach this to them? And I would basically like write down a lecture and then sort of make it more dissertation like, and so I, And I think what really made that transition to writing for more general audiences is being like, Oh, this is also just like teaching. So if I wanted to outline how to use this tool, for example, in a blog post, how would I have explained it to, you know, my colleagues?
How would I have explained it to my clients? And that teacherly voice always felt much more comfortable to me. But as I sort of get further and further away from the dissertation, the more I'm finding that I still do have some kind of knots around the, like, I'm a good teacher, but I'm maybe not a good writer.
And so I am really working to kind of untangle those things. And remember that, like you said, there is so little judgment around what makes a blog post a blog post, or like, what makes it worthy to be a newsletter. And I found that it's actually been really healing for me in certain ways to have people react to my writing and be like, this is really useful for me, and this is really positive, or I really liked it when you said this, or like, reply to a newsletter and say like, oh, this was great.
Because I felt like So much of my scholarship was just me either writing to absolute crickets, no one reading it, no one giving me any feedback, or feedback that was to put it mildly, less than constructive. So a lot of the scholarship process really left me feeling insecure, and so a lot of my business journey has been reclaiming that skill.
Hopefully that's not too vulnerable to share, but I think it's sometimes helpful for people to realize that, like, yes, I do write newsletters and blog posts, but, like, I'm not at all. You know, firing them off and being like, Ooh, good job, self, like, there's still some of that insecurity and double thinking and going back and forth that lots of us, I imagine, struggle with.
Mm. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. That is vulnerable and also validating to hear. Like, I imagine lots of folks listening feel that way too. As well around like, no, I have this great skill and sharing my knowledge in this way and then publishing for. You know, I don't know, sort of like performing our knowledge, which I think is really what we did in graduate school.
That was also something like while I really enjoy, and I think I grad school did prepare me to outline my writing very well. It also prepared me to like. Sort of perform my knowledge with jargon and that's something I've really worked hard to unlearn and undo and because it's really important for me to make scholarship accessible.
Right. Right. And, you know, so that is also something as well where I'm certainly. Yeah, that's been a learning curve for me as well, like unlearning using all the jargony theory terms. Absolutely. Yeah, there are so few opportunities for me to talk about it like epistemology in this particular line of work.
And that's both a blessing and a curse. They're like, I have to sort of take down some of that jargon, but it also challenges me in the same way that teaching did to be like, okay, like, if you can't use that word, you can't use that sort of phrasing. Do you know this well enough to translate it in a different.
Different language, almost. Yes. Awesome. I am excited for your wisdom in that particular genre. So we have one more question, which I'm really excited to talk about because it's something that I am feeling too. Hi, Katie and Kate. I am feeling really behind with all that I have to do between now and the end of the year.
And it's really discouraging. How do you deal with this wrap everything up rush? And so do you feel this rush, Kate? I actually, when I read this question, I was like, should I plan out the end of my year? Y'all know, not in a bad way, not in a bad way. But I, I actually like what came to my mind when I read this is like, okay, it's time to do a brain dump.
It's time to just get everything that could be done out of your head and onto the page to, you know, then. Like that can be its own step. So then you can be like, I don't have to remember everything. And I know that can feel really overwhelming for some folks to see everything you have to do. For me, I really love seeing a brain dump because then I can start to sort of say like, okay, what needs to be done good enough?
Like, what can I really do good enough? And like, also like within the realm of academia at the end of the year, I'm like, When are folks signing off for the end of the year? Like when are folks checking out? Everyone's really busy, you know? So those sort of things came to my mind, like what really needs to be done super well and what can just be delayed or, you know, just done well enough.
And also what came to my mind is thinking around like, Oh, making sure to like plan time off. Like particularly if this person is feeling rushed, like, is there a way that they can ensure that they are. Setting aside time to really rest and take a break, like, are there ways if they have you know, vacation or breaks scheduled around holidays, like, is there a way to actually make sure that they have that rest space?
That came to my mind as well. But what do you think? Absolutely. So this is something that I actually really struggle with because I love fresh starts so much. I am on the record in several places as being. Like. You know, really drawn to the magic of, like, new years and new moons and new weeks and new days and, like, that kind of, like, starting over energy and through the years I've kind of really dug into what itch that scratches for me and part of it is this idea that, like, I can only rest when everything's done.
And I think that so many of us feel that, and as a scholar, and so many of the people that I'm working with are like, well, I'll rest when I hit this milestone, I'll rest when the prospectus is done, I'll rest when this class is finished, I'll rest when my exams are passed, when I get this chapter done, and the problem with achievement based rest.
Like, that like rest you have to unlock is what I call like the moving goal line problem. That like, it just keeps going. And that as soon as you pass your exams, you have to start working on that prospectus. And then it's the chapter, and then it's the journal article, and the next class, like the pace really is relentless.
And so if you are always saying like, I will rest when I've worked enough for it to be worth it, I'm, I'm here to tell you from personal experience that you will experience some level of exhaustion, if not straight up clinical burnout, but also you're reinforcing the idea that your rest is predicated on you achieving enough to be worth it.
And like you said, like so many of us look forward to the end of the year as the a time where we can be with family or be with loved ones or take a break or enjoy the twinkle lights or sort of whatever it looks like for you, but that if you don't protect that space, if you don't actually genuinely plan for it, it is so easy to wake up on January 15th.
when your new semester starts and be like, wow, not only did I not get what I wanted to done, I also didn't rest. So for, I love the idea of a brain dump. I think that's really helpful. And I often go through my brain dump just like you do and be like, These are the things that must absolutely get done.
Here are the things that would be great to do if I have a little bit of extra energy or time in the tank. And here are things that I am explicitly giving myself permission not to do until the new year, the new semester starts. Whatever that sort of like reset period is and for me giving that like explicit permission like I give myself Explicit permission to not prep that next syllabus until after the holidays or like I give myself explicit permission To put off this journal article That's due in February until January really helps me because then it's not, I've closed that folder instead of leaving it on my desk, like maybe I'll get to it because I find that it's those open tasks that really make it difficult for me to unplug and actually rest.
Yes. Oh, thank you for all of that. That's excellent. That makes me think about, like, I also am like a new person, like I've already got my new bullet journal for the year that I've started to set up, you know, like, and it makes me think too, like for me, like, I'm like, Oh, I had all these 2024 goals. What if I didn't finish any?
And like you mentioned, like things I must get done, things I could do if I had some energy, you know, like things I may need to postpone. And I wonder if there's also like a fourth thing where it's like, do you want to Not do this anymore. Like, do you want to like give yourself permission to be like, I don't have to carry that with me into the new year.
Like I wanted to do this article or I wanted to apply for this job and actually like, I don't want to do that. I think especially if you're like a new year new me, that could be a nice thing to be like, yeah, I changed my mind about that one. That's okay. It's funny that you mentioned that because I was talking with my husband who's a software engineer about that exact issue.
And like in software engineering terms, they call that like, Backlog grooming, like you go through your backlog of like all of the things that have kind of accumulated and you make explicit decisions Like oh, that was a good idea But we're not going to do that or like and you close those things out because otherwise like I just imagine a person Like putting more and more things in their backpack and like I have this goal and I have this goal and sometimes it's really Helpful to be like, you know what that was a great goal for me nine months ago But it's not a great goal for me anymore.
And I'm giving myself permission to be like, you know what? I'm not the same person that set those goals. And there's no shame in letting them go and picking goals that actually feel good and useful and supportive for me. I love this. Yeah, maybe we should do a little workshop on like, I don't know, rinse and rinse and repeat, like clear your, clear your goals, close the backlog or something.
Absolutely. That's cool. I love it. Yeah, we will think about that. For maybe later, but I just want to say thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom with all of us. I'm so excited to get this out to all of our listeners. So wherever this finds you, when it finds you. We are wishing you, at least I am, but I'm pretty sure that Dr.
Henry is too a restful and restorative end of the year. Thanks so much. Bye bye.
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